Matinee
by Coronis
Summary: Reno and Rufus contemplate each other
1. Default Chapter

I'm back to a relative sense of normalcy now. Yaoi, Reno x Rufus.  
  
Matinee  
  
It's coming. I don't know why, and frankly I don't care to know. I await my love here in this leather cage, until he is finished playing at his father's diplomacy, until all that he endeavours so hard to resist swarms into him like a pious cloud of necrophiliac locusts, as hopelessly ruled by their desire for him as I am. He will come to me, step after step clattering down the carpet-clad hallways, against his better judgement of course. The very thought evokes from the depths of my tattered psyche a low laugh.....his better judgement! His better judgement is the reason why I fester here beneath Tseng's vitriolic authority and raging libido, why Strife torments me whilst I cannot crush him, and why I pay homage to wave after agonisingly tedious wave of the government's blazing neon doctrine. Oh, I love you, Rufus Shinra, but I'd just as soon shoot you as stay your dirty little secret for the rest of my life. Such humour is rife although unwelcome, must I once again await punishment? Perhaps a large device will materialize about my waist in threatening penance, ticking out beat after beat of enchanted melancholy, emblazoned with the word, "BOMB", in pearlescent semen-shaded letters. When the mechanical charges detonate without any great sound, the effects will be confined to my hair becoming further dishevelled and my hands suddenly presenting dark gunpowder stains, rather than the sickening scarlet trickling through their creased scars now. Some detached and gentle cartoon finality takes preference in my mind over being annihilated in an explosion of white light from Weapon's vengeful arsenal. Once more, my love for Rufus wells up beside these thoughts, taunting me with all its glorious prospects. Blossom, sweet undeniable emotion, let your rainbow beams of radiant agony sand-blast my ethereal skin and bleed my sickness dry for the one who owns my heart. I want it back, Rufus.  
  
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Christ almighty.....Dark Nation is chewing my shoes. Sometimes I wish he would just choke to death........at my feet, on his own rabid breath as his master commands. I am powerless even to deter him from his prize, akin to my lover in so many ways, my loyal, if disobedient canine guard is lean and muscular, with an unknowable glint in his eye, a shimmer of knowledge drowning in deep pools of dark diamonds. Not intelligence lost, merely overwhelmed by undisciplined passion. That is why I love Reno so, for his fire, his temprament spurring him to reach for the stars with a child's belief, his refusal to accept defeat. Most of all the inferno raging from the crown of his head to his shoulderblades; how I long for him to let it loose......to let that pyromanic russet river pour free between my unblemished fingers, these pallid arachnids which have never seen the sun, hungry for the touch of hair no man could tame. Especially not Reno. Ah, now the eternal awkwardness. To call him my lover would not be telling the exact truth. He is my partner only behind securely fastened doors. I often resign myself to wondering, long after Reno has wilted and fallen into light bouts of dreamless sleep beside me, why do we not confess our immoral adoration, what dreadful apparition do we fear so? The press? This I doubt. Our enemy is our own prudish vanity, cloistered between increasingly frequent moonlit encounters. One of my father's most ardently quoted lessons drilled into my memory by robotic recitations, day after day. "Vanity is our enemy", the political enemy........of a man whose hobbies all involved Scarlet and a whip. They say he built an empire, a wondrous stillborn child studded with formless stone and glass gargoyles. What did you build, Father? Only spectral castles of fear and torment, transparent milestones anchoring the faith of the filthy unwashed rejects of a civil war-torn Midgar in your twisted wisdom. It is a quiet war they fight, against disease, pestilence and death, but most of all against my juvenile regime. And through this tumult, Reno has been my antagonist, my soulmate and the only thing which kept me sane. So often has he discouraged me from this life of debate, slandering the profession I was unceremoniously lumbered with, amusing me just enough to survive another day of it. How I long for it to end.  
  
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Chapter 2 coming soon As soon as I can be bothered Thank you to everyone who reviews my submissions - have faith, I'll get good in the end  
  
Coronis @-)-- 


	2. Chapter II

[pic]  
  
Chapter II  
  
I realised why no-one in the boardroom was listening to me this morning. I was trying to outline new procedures for dealing with Weapon; if you could call them that. My prime directive was probably just to run away with Reno if it got dangerous. National defense plans were written, troops mobilized, what troops were left alive and sane. I spoke clearly, and slowly enough for even Scarlet to understand, but then something stopped me. The sound of laughter. Reeve was joking with the guards about meaningless things, Heidegger may as well have been humping the walls for all I cared, but they were paying no attention to me. And then I realised that they couldn't hear me, because........I couldn't hear myself. They filed out with an air of solemnitude, that last vestige of respect ground beneath their heels for me to sweep under the carpet; Reeve's cigarette ash, residue from the soles of Scarlet's cheap stilhettos. I sank into the cool concrete, a coarse triumph no expensive furniture could conceal. A twinkling sheet of heat and static blankets my brain, daily exerting the exact degree of pressure it needs to govern my father's empire, albeit with varying degrees of justice, and not a lot else. Vibrant Turk, protect me, calm my shakes with caffeine. Maybe I will spill a little on your smooth-scarred throat and spirit it away with featherlight kisses. My Reno, traverse these perspex citadels and find me, fly from the great swell of pain and visceral battle, the denizens of a false mirror image of feudal society, find me, save me.  
  
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I am still waiting, although what I am expecting, longing for even, has changed. Since Rufus called to me through screaming silence of a metropolis on its knees in desperation, to rescue him from his seraphic curse, those beautiful breathless convulsions he so fiercely denies yet could not survive without. I ran to him, my heart and my arms ablaze, devouring their own emptiness. I found him leaning against the wall of his office, his pupils dancing amid the shadows tattooing his opulent prison cell. If Shinra is the life-blood of this land, our love must surely be its tears. My employer's eyes shone with liquid, his gaze swimming toward me, his sobs floating on a sigh of something like relief. I held back my grief at having to see him so, and scolded myself for finding it so damn arousing. He cried for me once before, some private sodomite's peep-show, while I sweated and buckled beneath him, taking in hour after hour of tireless love on his mother's bed. Suddenly he moaned, perhaps to the tune of, "Cloud", that single sacrosanct mantra shattered our rhythmic synergy, his hot spasmodic thrusts each a spear marked for every ghost or demon in every corner of heaven who would deem our adoration immoral. The President's tears smashed against my arched spine, agonised needles raining down acupuncture on the nearest receptive underbeing, deliverance for the damned. Rufus, my lord, I love you. At that moment the aural world shifted violently although seeming to take for ever, an hour's explosion played out in a second. I heard a pulsing intonation coming from all around me, from inside my most secret self and from him. The resonance of a bell replaced the usual droning vibrations, as though the entire universe were glistening, baptised in the brilliance of the new-born night, and in the radiant black glow of our love. I smiled down at him, for the memory of that night and so many others, willing myself to tell him it would all be all right. I could not lie to him. He asked me why my eyes still mourn as my mouth smiles.... Iron-clad rose, why do you seek the answers you are already certain of? My eyes glitter with tears long after they are shut in sanguinary sleep for all the love I have lost, yet I smile for all the joy I have found in you. Why, then, will you not admit me here? Will I disrupt your power facade, darling? I am jealous of my lover's lap dogs, who are privileged enough to sit with him here, his polyester army suffocating him for the sake of democracy. One woman has remained in his employ for fifteen years, her sole duty to fetch the Shinra archangels their coffee. As if coffee was anything like what Rufus needed.......I made him one anyway. He likes it warm, not boiling, unsweetened, and stirred until it almost matches the colour of Tseng's skin. Not that Tseng is any kind of barometer because he's never here. Screwing that Ancient so relentlessly might have sent him green by now. I shuddered, envious for all the wrong reasons. I'm glad to be rid of him, but I know that the slums will not relinquish beauty without a fight. Neither of them will ever leave that subterranean temple, bound to each other by the genetically-ingrained filth of Midgar, they'll just burn each other out. Exactly like us.  
  
Chapter 3 coming soon......beware  
  
For everyone who has reviewed my various tortured ramblings, and for Miriya, just because I can, and because Dark Nation can chew my shoes anytime. *Ahem*. 


	3. Chapter III

Chapter III  
  
I can't breathe in here. Ever since Weapon's first assault the air- conditioner has been offline. I keep coughing and seeing blood for half a second before blinking it away, as though malfunction dare rape the reputation of the most powerful man in the country. Have you ever seen the world in a second? I didn't think so. I did this afternoon, granted insanity at last by a ravishing she-devil forged of my own frustration. I saw a girl of no more than sixteen wandering the streets of the city, her hospital gown bathed in moonlight and whatever she last ate. The curve of her pregnancy matches the soft outline of the moon as she meanders barefoot, dragging some plastic umbilical prayer along with her. She pretends that the canula in her left hand and the transparent fluid bag suspended from a wheeled aluminium gallows loves her, that someone loves her. Tears splash the stone and she makes no attempt to stop them, mumbling over and over to herself the now incoherent spells, "It will be okay. I'm going home to my family. They love me", she hugs these lies closer as her child kicks, she does not curse it for the bile that blesses the rugged paving slabs, "We won't starve". It hurts her almost as much knowing that these things aren't true, as knowing that they're all she has to live on. I cried for that girl, so suddenly a woman, as I made love to Reno, corrupted as easily as an angel-faced child by the fact that this same deed was what destroyed her. It's the most crippling feeling in the world knowing that no- one loves you, that those who you associate with don't want you and those who made you regret it. And only love can break your heart. Reno felt it, just like I did, and now that we have each other's love we don't hurt any less - now we are besotted with the fear that it will end someday, and with our terrible impending destiny.  
  
Can't every day be what it is, and not fettered to tomorrow's tomorrow with strands of snow-white greed that flail in vain attempts to escape the gutter. I need these comforts, and although I never actively seek them in Reno's arms I inevitably take the quick fix and find them there. Laziness doth perpetuate itself of course, and he does the same in me. We're blind orphans now, handcuffed together and stumbling toward the light. We always were that way, it's just that now we have the maturity to see it. Jessie's dead. The first girl I ever slept with, washed away and buried beside her dreams. A star-marked fighter though she may have been, she lay down for me and then for the collapsing plate all too easily. Reno and I aren't like that, I smile brashly. We'll succeed. Oh God. I'm doing it again. Just like that girl, I'm coaxing myself into believing that it's alright, not that I've lived in my office for weeks, that it stinks of hot milk and Reno's vomit, or that Weapon is coming, that I'm loved at last. Which of course is not true. Hopeless, now the truth is dawning, brilliant and so indescribably painful. I am dead. We all are. And I am that woman's child.  
  
  
  
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I scare myself, sometimes. When I force myself to exhaust Rufus and then watch him sleep. When I whisper things to him with my mind and hope that the sweet sins invade his nightmares. Let me be your drug, my love, let me penetrate you through a needle-point prism and fill you with the light of your own blood, and let the chains of two lifetimes of agony strangle you. You look so peaceful. I dreamed this time, Rufus. After I took you, and hearing you call me Cloud made my insides lurch with bitter jealousy, the lone candle obscuring the violet moth's flight. I dreamed until dawn. I saw the two of us making a pact so we might never be apart, even in the sinewed arms of Hades. You took a razor blade, and gently let the cool metal flow over your wrist. Like sex, first you then I took our turns at this refreshing mutilation, drinking in each other's life elixir through air so laden with the emotions we would never acknowledge. We lay together on your bed and embraced, preparing to doze for all eternity, should such a concept ever rear its ugly head. I was happy to expire with you until........such a murky detached veil was thrown over my eyes, I rose from our mutual pyre and decided I could not allow Death to simply obliterate us, before our love has left its treacherous mark upon this mock Freemasonry that masquerades as a corporation. We must live, I thought -there is money to make and people to kill. But I couldn't wake you, Rufus.  
  
I steeled myself against it, but somehow I knew it was true. You are dying, aren't you? For a second I could see twin trails of naked garnet tracking down your arms, unwilling to justify itself and asking nothing in the way of redemption. A dream it may have been, although some ominous portend it will no doubt prove itself. The unmistakeable pheromones of semen and alcohol slashed the air, proud and defiant as it left my mouth and greedily sprawled across the carpet. Memories of all I drank last night flooded across the fabric pile and squinted back at me as I probed their limits with glassy, diaphanous eyes. It wasn't the drink that made me hurl. I shoot up between my toes.....that way no-one sees the scars - not like Rude, his hands are covered in little septic sores since the veins in his arms all got tapped out. I sighed, not wanting to taste the residue borne on a current of amniotic hatred incapable of loving its only son. All this anger has no medium of release except furious defiant ensconcement in Rufus' arms, or just killing things. I guess that's what Rufus loves about me; he knows me so well and I hate him for it. I can never hate him for long. But I will always hate myself for allowing love to permeate my shield, for rendering me so despicably complete and at the same time shocking seven shades of shit out of me. That's all I am, bare bones, for Rufus and anyone else to see. I'm just so fucking scared.  
  
  
  
~fin~  
  
Maybe there will be a chapter 4........Thank you to all who review.  
  
Dark Nation is a hemaphrodite.  
  
Coronis 


End file.
